


bezoar

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alcohol, Drinking & Talking, Friendship, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, Post-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-19 20:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7376839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luke smiles, a half-hearted, half-formed thing that’s more sad than amused. Like Lando said, kid looks like hell. And not just because of the bruise still mottling his cheek, the purple spreading and fading thanks to the near-constant application of bacta. It’s more than just the physical toll. More even than the mangle made of his arm, the one thing they can’t do much about until they make it back to the Alliance fleet, get him some real medical assistance. Just a few more days of carefully calculated hyperspace jumps, old-school smuggler tactics to obfuscate their true destination, and he’ll be fine.</p><p>Somehow, Lando’s not filled with confidence that that’ll solve Luke’s problem for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bezoar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elsajeni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsajeni/gifts).



> [written as a treat for Not Prime Time 2016]

“Kid, you look like hell,” Lando says, matter-of-fact, no bullshit, just the truth told plain. Doesn’t matter that Lando’s back is turned and he only knows Luke’s there at all from the sound of his boots approching across the _Falcon’s_ unforgiving floor. Lando’s a master of the well-timed recitation of hunches. And he’s got a pretty good feeling about his right now. He knows he’s not wrong about this.

“Funny,” Luke replies, venturing further into the cramped space of the mess hall—a generous name for the room if ever there was one. Or, well… it _is_ a mess. So that, at least, is accurate. Crates of spare parts that don’t belong in an eating space stand stacked in three corners out of five and there are grease stains on the walls that look like they’ve been there since Lando lost the _Falcon_ to Han in the first place. Grease of the mechanical sort at that, black streaking swipes of it like Han just couldn’t bother with a towel and had wiped his hand against the nearest surface instead. How it ended up here at all is anyone’s guess.

The less said about the pantry, the better. Lando’s half-stuck inside the damned thing, pretending he’s literally anywhere else as he pushes aside haphazard piles of vacuum-sealed meal cubes, brown and unappetizing. A few of the thick, blocky squares fall to the floor with a vicious thwack totally and completely of their own accord. Not a single one finds it in its heart to prove itself to be anything other than old and stale and unbreakable. Lando kicks at them as Luke pokes his head in, uninjured shoulder and side pressed against the doorframe.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Contracting a disease probably,” Lando answers, scrubbing his hand across his upper lip. “Might want to step back, avoid breathing in the…”

“Dust?”

“Yeah, let’s call it that.”

Luke smiles, a half-hearted, half-formed thing that’s more sad than amused. Like Lando said, kid looks like hell. And not just because of the bruise still mottling his cheek, the purple spreading and fading thanks to the near-constant application of bacta. It’s more than just the physical toll. More even than the mangle made of his arm, the one thing they can’t do much about until they make it back to the Alliance fleet, get him some real medical assistance. Just a few more days of carefully calculated hyperspace jumps, old-school smuggler tactics to obfuscate their true destination, and he’ll fine.

Somehow, Lando’s not filled with confidence that that’ll solve Luke’s problem for him.

“How’re you doing?” Lando asks, shoving aside a box—a _whole box_ —of unopened… he doesn’t want to know. The script’s Galactic Standard, but the words, the words mean nothing to him. Frowning, he steps back and plants his hands on his hips, eyes ranging wide across the floor-to-ceiling shelves. There’s no way Han’s stashed all the liquor in his quarters because that would mean Lando’s shit out of luck, stuck on what is effectively a dry ship because he won’t break into Han’s bunk, and that’s not a situation Lando wants to be in right now; there’s gotta be something here. He’s just gotta be smarter than Han and _find it_.

“I’m okay,” Luke replies.

Even with half his attention elsewhere and only a couple of days of acquaintance between them, Lando hears the note of false cheer in Luke’s voice. Brow arching, he nods. “Anyone ever tell you it’s pointless to bullshit a bullshitter?”

Lando taps his foot, thoughtful, as he waits for Luke to answer. He crouches, knocks his knuckles against the floor. Solid, solid, solid. He stretches toward the back of the pantry, far too aware of the grime coating his palms as he does. But success: a hollow note sounds out. “Gotcha,” he mutters. Climbing to his feet because he’d rather not risk whatever’s on the floor getting onto his pants, he dusts off his hands and strides toward Han’s secret cache. _Please let it be liquor,_ he thinks, _and not something else_.

Prying the panel free, he lets out a laugh and flips open the lid on one of the three cases of better-than-he-could-have-hoped-for whisky. Baratavini whisky, but whisky all the same. He lifts one bottle free of its protective packaging and puts everything else back to right. Lando hadn’t realized Han harbors this much of a sweet tooth. Lando kind of wishes he still didn’t know it. Seems too intimate a thing to have learned while your friend’s…

_We find you, I’ll replace this, you hear?_

Turning, offering Luke his full attention for the first time, he waggles the bottle back and forth, amber-pale liquid sloshing against the sides. “Got no answer for me, huh?”

“About what?” Luke asks, dubious and far too innocent.

“Bullshitting bullshitters,” he replies. Stepping up to Luke, who still hasn’t vacated the doorway, he asks to pass with a polite pardon me. Getting the hint, Luke retreats, allowing Lando to punch at the locking mechanism outside the pantry. The door slides shut only reluctantly, like maybe it’s not quite ready to be forgotten yet. Lando wouldn’t blame it for that. Who knows when next anyone will give enough of a damn to try getting inside. “Come on.”

He drops the bottle onto the tiny table mounted in the corner of the room not occupied by boxes of junk and slaps the benches set where the walls meet. “Take a seat,” he says.

Luke crosses the room, does as Lando suggests. Sitting, he twists the bottle by its neck and peers at the label. Lando watches him for a moment under the guise of retrieving a pair of glasses. For a kid who’s supposed to have more than a little touch of the Force about him, he’s sure not very observant. Maybe it’s all that hair falling into his face.

Glasses pinched between thumb and forefinger, Lando returns, sliding onto the bench Luke hadn’t picked. The thick, crystal clear glasses clunk against the table as he places them there. He pours enough liquor into the one he’s designating as Luke’s to fell a rancor—or fully part a man with his drinking budget were he in an unscrupulous establishment. For himself, obviously, he does the same.

“I don’t really—” Luke says, shrugging, his hand pressed palm down against the table. His other arm remains in a tight sling against his chest. Lando’s at fault here, but the way Luke looks at Lando, you’d think it was the kind of accident anyone could get into. Like Lando’s not responsible at all. Despite the melancholy, Luke still behaves the way anyone might toward him. There’s none of the knowing, the passive aggression, the anger Lando might have expected to bear anywhere in his attitude toward Lando.

“Okay,” Lando says. His fingertip clicks at the rim of the glass. “Then you mind if I…?”

Luke shakes his head.

“Cheers,” Lando replies, holding his glass up. The liquor catches the light, almost glowing under it. The scent of it hits him first, strong and sharp, but it goes down smooth enough. One of those weird quirks of nature, he supposes. Nothing that smells like it could thin paint ought to taste so much like candy. He knocks back a decent slug of it and places the half-drained glass on the table.

“So,” Lando says, “you want to talk about it?”

“There’s…” He bows forward, shakes those damned bangs out of his face. But the kid’s quick on the uptake. Already knows better than to try lying again. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“You don’t,” Lando says right back to him. _Then why are you here?_ If he’d only come to find some grub, he’d have done that. He wouldn’t have hung around, bashful. Lando would put credits on that. Luke wants something. Or needs it. And Lando’s the only one here, the only one who’s got nowhere else to be. Besides, he owes it to the kid to listen to whatever he’s got to say. If he can bring himself to say it.

Luke’s mouth forms a lopsided slash as he looks down at the glass, wraps his hand awkwardly around it and pulls it toward him, hesitant. He’s a little shaky picking it up, but he gets it to his mouth easy enough and he doesn’t wince as he sips.

“You’ve ever gotten the kind of news you think has to be a bad dream?” Luke asks, too serious to be rhetorical.

“Yeah.” Lando eyes his glass, wonders if this is gonna be one of those conversations that need a second round of drinks and a hangover cure in the morning. He’d say they all have, but experience tells him saying as much’ll be less than useless and not nearly as comforting as a person wants to believe.

There’s a long, painful moment where Luke doesn’t speak. Lando doesn’t try to force him. “Can I trust you with something?” he asks finally, finger tracing around the base of his glass.

“I could say yes,” Lando says, not letting himself feel stung at the question. As far as Luke’s concerned, it’s a valid one. As far as anyone’s concerned right now in actuality. “But I know I’ve done nothing to prove that to you.”

Luke nods, slow and thoughtful, distant in a way that makes Lando wonder whether he’s heard Lando at all. Then he lifts his eyes and smiles a little darkly. He tilts his head, fingertips brushing his temple. “I can tell things about people,” he says. “You don’t have to prove anything. You’re trustworthy enough.”

“That’s a weight off my shoulders, kid,” Lando says, deadpan. “So what is it? Gotta be a hell of a thing if you’re coming to me with it.”

“Yeah,” he says, fidgeting like hell, fingers now tapping against the table in a quick, fluttering rhythm. “Yeah, it’s… I fought Darth Vader, you know?” He lifts his injured arm and, finally, winces. “Not well obviously. But he had, uh, something to tell me.”

“Lord Vader,” Lando says, spitting out the name, “always has something to tell somebody. And none of it is anything anyone else wants to hear. You can’t let it—”

“I’m his son.” He chews over the words, treats them more savagely than Lando had thought him capable. They hit the space between them like blaster fire and leave behind a smoking, cratering residue. You might not be able to see it, but it’s there all the same.

“You’re not…” He’s heard _stories_ about Vader. Everyone has. The pitying sort and the mocking alike. “I mean, you _can’t_ be. He’s—” Well, there’s no delicate way to say it. And so Lando doesn’t. One wild thought flickers through his mind. _But what if…_

“Oh, no. I very much am.” His tone takes on the same quality a particularly amusing executioner’s might, both cold and light and too, too aware of the fragility of the moment. “I have no doubts on that account.”

Lando’s mind churns through possible responses, appropriate and not, quick as he can, because he can’t—he _can’t_ let this admission linger. It’s gotta’ve taken a lot out of Luke to get it out there. And this kind of thing? It needs getting out. Lando can’t even begin to imagine what knowing this about yourself might be like. Lando can’t be Luke’s ideal confessor, but he doesn’t have a lot of options and, quite probably, whatever opinion Lando holds, it can’t be worth much. Makes Lando safe enough to tell, Lando supposes.

For that reason, Lando want to find the _right_ opinion. The one he truly believes and not just the one that bites him first, returns the worst recoil. Unfortunately, taking too long to answer is, in itself, a response and not necessarily the one Lando wants to give. Luke’s a good kid, best Lando’s run into in a long time. Doesn’t matter where he comes from.

And there it is.

“Damned good thing we’re not the blood that runs through our veins then, isn’t it?” Lando says, tone brooking no argument, swiping up his glass again, this time finishing its contents. “I take it you haven’t told anyone else?”

“No.”

The whisky glugs loudly as Lando takes the opportunity to top Luke’s glass off. He doesn’t refill his own though. “Are you going to?”

“I don’t know.”

Lando doesn’t state the obvious and suggest he go to Leia with this. She’s good with a lot of things. She’s at least got history with Luke. But telling her about this right now would be like igniting a flamethrower near a stack of explosives. It might not blow up in anyone’s face, but it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility if it did. Especially if that flamethrower got turned the wrong way around. Given enough time, though, given getting Han back, he thinks even Leia would be a fine choice of confidants. Still. That’s a long way off and Luke clearly couldn’t wait that long and now he’s stuck with Lando. Which is too bad considering how far out of his depth Lando is. “You’re handling it pretty well,” he says, neutral. “All things considered.”

Luke’s fingers scrape at the table, like he’s used to being able to pick at ‘em, but the brushed metal of this one foils him in the attempt. After a moment, he settles, reaches again for his glass and pokes at it like he can’t decide whether he wants to drink it or push it over. “What else can I do?”

“A lot of things,” Lando replies. “I can think of more than a few that are way worse than what you’re doing.”

Luke shakes his head, a stubborn look settling on his face. “We have to get Han back. That’s the priority.” His shoulders jerk as he shrugs, a pained scowl flashing across his face. “This is just…”

“This is just life’s way of telling a joke on you,” Lando says, stabbing at the center of the table with his index finger. “You just have to tell a joke right back.”

Luke’s mouth twitches; Lando gets the feeling Luke might be somewhat amused. “I don’t know that that means.”

“Me neither,” Lando admits. “But I promise I’ll get back to you when I figure it out.”

His voice goes a little nasal with a mostly failed attempt at sarcasm. “Thanks.”

Lando opens his mouth to say something. _Don’t thank me just yet_ or _no problem_ or who knows what else. But something about the lost way he stares down at his hand and the table and the glass that crumbles his words to powder. “You’ve got people who care about you,” he says, wondering just what the hell he’s doing when he doesn’t have the right. “This—it’s not going to change anything for them. You know that, right? I don’t know Leia well, but it’s obvious to me that you’re important to her, but Han… Han’ll call it a tough break and go back to treating you exactly the same way he always has.”

Luke peers up at him, squints a little. “You think so?”

“Yeah.” Lando reaches across the table and shoves him lightly on the shoulder—his good shoulder. “I’ll prove it to you when we get him back.”

Luke’s lip twitches and he nods, mulling it over. The kid deserves some kind of certainty—not that Lando can truly supply it. But he’d bet Cloud City, too, if he hadn’t already lost it: there’s no way his friends are going to abandon him over this. For that reason alone, Lando hopes Luke believes him and finds a measure of comfort in that belief.

“Thanks,” Luke says without even a hint of insincerity this time, heartened maybe. Lando’s glad to see it. Might not be much considering what Lando’s got to make up for, but it’s a step in the right direction. He lifts his eyes to Lando’s. The wealth of—stuff Lando can see there… it’s unsettling. But Lando doesn’t lower his own gaze, doesn’t flinch. Not until Luke speaks again anyway. “You’re a good man, Lando. Better than you give yourself credit for.”

Lando swallows, reconsiders his decision to not have another drink. His grin, when he musters it, could be considered dazzling under generous circumstances. “I dunno. I give myself a lot of credit.”

“I’m sure you do,” Luke says, eyes brightening with a tentative—very tentative—playfulness. Makes him look about ten years younger. “Doesn’t change the fact.”

 _Be sure to tell Han that when we get a hold of him,_ Lando thinks, more than a little sardonic. _Maybe Leia, too_. “I’ll take your word for it,” he says, digging up some of that old-fashioned gentlemanliness he keeps hidden in his back pocket for situations in which he doesn’t want to argue.

“Good,” Luke says, pushing himself, a little wavering, to his feet. Lando’s first instinct is to hop up and sling his arm around Luke’s shoulders, guide him back to his bunk. That’s what he’d have to do if it was Han who was that unsteady. But Luke’s his own man. He hadn’t had that much to drink, half his glass still accounted for plus the extra Lando had poured. After a moment his spine straightens and that’s when Lando realizes the reason his balance is off might have nothing at all to do with imbibing alcohol. Luke’s hand slides down the length of the table, fond, as though they’d managed to build something here together that isn’t entirely horrid even while not being entirely pleasant either. “Have a good night, Lando.”

“I usually try at least,” Lando calls after Luke as he heads toward the door, unsure what else to say.

His attention drifts momentarily and his words are soft, blurry, when he speaks. “A friend of mine says, ‘There is no try.’ Seemed to know what he was talking about. For all I know, it’s good advice.”

Lando climbs to his feet himself. He’d intended sitting in here a while longer, but… maybe Luke—or Luke’s friend—is correct. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll walk you back. You can tell me more about this friend of yours.”

“Sure. If you want,” Luke replies, launching into a tale Lando wouldn’t have believed for a second if it had come out of anyone else’s mouth. He seems to enjoy the recitation, his uninjured arm sketching animated shapes in the air around him. His words take on more strength the longer he speaks and Lando wonders if he hadn’t shared much of _this_ story with anyone else yet either.

“You mean to tell me he made you stand on your hands for—how long again?” he asks, revving Luke up for the hell of it.

Laughing, Luke continues, “That’s not even the worst part either. He wanted me to _levitate my X-wing._ Out of a _swamp_.”

“Kid,” he says, hand settling on Luke’s shoulder, a serious mask falling over his features as he stalls their journey, leaving them cramped on two sides by a cluttered hallway, “you’ve got a gift for trouble.” Lando thinks about it a little more, starts laughing again. “That won’t always be a bad thing.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Luke says, hopeful perhaps, a little less shadowed anyway. “Won’t we?”

“Guess we will,” Lando replies, coming to a decision. _And I’ll be there to make sure it’s not so overwhelming when it is._

 _Han and Leia aren’t your only friends_.

 _Not anymore_.


End file.
